Josh Miller, then on our investment team at Thrive, worked on our Series A investment in Pitch, where diligence revealed the potential of collaborative workflows. That core insight led Josh to lead an incubation for a new type of browser, now called Arc. 

Although he didn’t have the full founding team in place yet, the vision for what we called “Browser Company” at the time was crystal clear to him. Josh knew the technical lead had to be Hursch, his former co-founder, and we went about searching for the right CEO to lead the company. We set aside an option pool for a future CEO hire, and retained our typical ownership for an incubation.

As the Browser team began prototyping, Josh realized that building Browser himself was his true calling, and he wanted to step into the CEO role, even though that wasn’t originally part of the plan.

Josh’s vision and ability to tell the story of Browser better than any external hire made him the right fit, so we restructured the equity – giving more to Browser company than we initially planned – to ensure Josh was fully invested and motivated to lead Browser as if it had been his from the very beginning.

By giving up some of our own equity, we made sure that Browser had the leadership it needed to succeed. We didn’t have to make this choice but we believe in doing what’s right every time, not just what’s easy.